Productivity

I’ve been distant on my blogging these last months, as we have had extensive family upheaval. After moving in January 2016, and spending a full year moving / working on the old house / finally selling the old house, my aunt was in a car accident in November 2016. This led to the most trips between Tennessee and Maryland that I ever thought possible. Trips to sort out her things, to clean out and sell her house when it became obvious she could not return home, and to move those family heirlooms that I wanted from her home. Then in January 2017, my grandfather fell ill with pneumonia, and without my aunt to assist, we brought him home with hospice car in February 2017 to his home in Maryland. We made many trips to visit family over the year, and my grandfather died in December 2017.

In these first few months of 2018, we have been frantically cleaning out my grandfather’s home (which he purchased over fifty years ago) of all of the items that we wanted to keep — including his printshop. My grandfather, Jacob LaRue Warner, was a hobby printer for over 50 years. Here is an article he wrote in his monthly journal The Boxwooder, which was reprinted in Type & Press in 1989.

All of this leads to the birth of the Chase Alley Press. Marc and I are very grateful to be done with the printshop moving process, (which included riggers using cranes to move equipment from the basement to our truck) and have taken possession of all of the presses, type, printed matter, and other equipment from the Boxwood Press and are naming our private press the Chase Alley Press. We shall be publishing a series of articles about the presses and the shop as we complete our inventory and restoration process.

I have never been so excited about a website launch than I am at this moment. I’ve been able to take my strongest skills from across my hobbies, merge them with my web development skills, and create a fantastic product that I can’t wait to share with the world. It’s a dream web app for me, and something that I’ll enjoy using for years and years to come. And it’s something forcing me to meet more of my goals for this year with learning Javascript and taking my WordPress development to the next level.

If you’ve read other posts on my blog, you realize I’ve had a crazy beginning to 2016 — moving houses, job transitions, trying to fix the old house to sell, and other smaller things.

However, one item that has really helped me pull through is a planner I bought off Kickstarter in the fall — the Spark Planner. I am a junkie for productivity tools, and especially written planners, but I’ve been shocked at how much this planner has helped me. I set annual, monthly, and weekly goals, which I follow and set tasks to push me closer every day.

I originally thought this would help me take my business to the next level but instead, I’ve found that it’s rounding me in many aspects of life. I was late on the kickstarter, so I didn’t get my planner until right before February 1, so this is more of a “first quarter” check-in.

My annual goals were focused on the idea of growth: Growth of spirit, finances, learning, and body.

My top goals were:

Increase my income

Sell my old house

Become more multilingual (learn Chinese)

Increase knowledge

Lose weight

Increase fitness

Complete a half-ironman or equivalent

At this point, there have been several setbacks on the physical front – medical issues are flaring up with larger amounts of exercise, so I have to take things much slower than I thought. I also found that I have a medical condition which puts me at very high risk of illness from open water swimming (more susceptible to bacteria, etc) so I likely won’t be able to do a half-ironman official event in the fall. I’m still contemplating pulling it off in a gym setting for the swimming portion. Still, I can figure that out later. Getting in the running shape is the hardest part of a triathlon for me, so that is what I am focusing on right now, and I’ve lost 15 lbs since New Years.

I’m making serious headway in learning Chinese as well. I’m learning Mandarin, and contrary to much advice, I’m attempting to learn to read, write, listen, and speak simultaneously. Therefore, it’s going slowly, but if I learn only to hear and speak, I will have a much harder time reading and writing later, and vice versa. That’s how I learn best. Definitely don’t try to hold a conversation with me yet… I’m a super beginner. My personal goal for the year is to get my fluency up to a casual proficiency level, and be able to begin reading websites written in Chinese, and begin to learn about Chinese typography. I have to learn the language more, before nuances in typography are understandable. Definitely a language that makes me wish I were in a larger city with an actual Chinese population in order to learn better — I haven’t seen or met anyone here who has fluency, in order to “check” my pronunciation skills.

Increasing my income is an interesting goal. Since I chose that goal, my previous work position crumbled, so I took some time to decide how to move forward. At this point, I’m still freelancing through my business that I co-own with my husband (The Bunny Network) and I haven’t really increased my income, but it’s regaining back to where it was, and I have some promising options for the future as well. I applied for several full time positions, but I have several other paths open to me right now, and that makes for an interesting season of exploration. Everything that I’m doing now is growing my career strengths, even if it isn’t making short term income, so I am happy with my current movement on growing my career.

The big goal I didn’t list earlier, that has taken precedence also, is organization. There’s nothing like moving as a family after 6 years in one house, to show you that you have a lot of organizational needs. A lot of my weekly and monthly goals have revolved around the organization in the new house.

So the question you’re probably wondering now is, how much of this really has been helped by the planner?

I have made annual goals, every single year. But I never really hold myself to them, or revisit them. The Spark Planner pushes me to think about them in creating my monthly and weekly goals, and has reoriented my life to the bigger goals, rather than the smaller goals. In the past, I’ve been great at task lists and other things, but I haven’t focused every week on meeting my annual goals for me as a person. When I fail to meet a goal, I see it, realize it, and let it shape the next week. The single largest thing I’ve learned from the process, however, is to keep my eyes on the larger goals rather than the small tasks, and this has really pushed me to grow much more than I otherwise would have. I look forward to coming up with my goals each week, and I hope to revisit with a new blog post after another quarter.

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About Me

I am a Front End Developer at Ministry Brands, and a freelance developer for my company The Bunny Network. I'm a wife, and mother of an amazing 5 year old. A third generation printer on both sides of my family, I have ink in my veins and a love of the printed word. I'm also into genealogy, historical preservation, bicycling, and going for a half-Ironman triathlon in the fall.